Courtney Abraham

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Courtney to the Built By People Podcast. Courtney, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:55GuestExcellent. Well, thanks, Dave. I appreciate the invitation. Oh my goodness. My career journey. I actually grew up with overachieving parents. They had a firm belief they had to leave their fingerprints on the world around them. So whether it was their 9 to 5 job, their mission work, their church work, their volunteer activity, they also owned a specialty chocolate store. So I grew up thinking that I also had to make my way in the world and figure out what that was. So before I ever got to college, I worked in their specialty chocolate store and I learned the importance of inventory management, scheduling, budgeting, just really good core set of skills. And that allowed me kind of go through university, come out of university. My first job obviously was in retail then, 'cause I weighed back on the early work, early experience I had. And then I took an experience from a consultancy perspective in the world of strategy and change management. And I, at some point, took a hard right turn into HR. I had an opportunity to work for amazing leaders who saw something in me that I didn't know I had, and they coached and they developed me and helped me figure out what the right opportunities were. And so I was pretty selective in the roles that I ended up choosing or saying yes to. And that hard right turn into HR, it was, it was scary because I went from a revenue-producing function into a non-revenue-producing function and relocated with my family. So many opportunities in my career I've said yes to have come with substantial change. Not only do you take the new job, but you change the city, you change the school, you change the community. But that has given me a broader perspective. And to be honest with you, being in my role today as a CHRO, this is the job I never knew I wanted, and I absolutely love.

▶2:58HostCourtney, you, you also have a lot of experience in private equity environments. How do you balance the focus on value creation within those environments while also ensuring that HR initiatives remain people-centric?

▶3:14GuestIt's a great question. So the world of private equity is not for the faint of heart. I've had great opportunities to work with a variety of different PE companies, and what I'd say the largest kind of aha moment is you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and scope creep is a thing, right? So you have to go beyond the initial parameters of your role. And dust off skills that you haven't had in a very long time or had to use in a long time. So when you look through the value lens or value creation lens, it's about what drives productivity, what creates retention, what motivates discretionary effort. And many people initiatives may seem like a good idea, but it's what impact they will have on the organization. So I'll give you an example. We're running a creating a culture of service initiative. It's about how we work better, faster, more collaboratively with our internal and external internal customers, and it's the fabric of how we act. And yes, we've got tons of metrics and measures with that, but it's the, so what? Is that going to change the change or accelerate the way in which we get back to a customer? Is that going to increase someone's ability to walk out of their cubicle and down the hallway to have a quick conversation as opposed to 17 emails? Is it going to get the order out the door faster? What I will say is the training that we have implemented as a part of that, the feedback has been fantastic. And a lot of our employees come from, you know, former GE and Hubble employees. So for them to say, hey, the training that's gone along with this creating a culture of service initiative, it's some of the best training I've had in years. It's a huge compliment, but more than that, it's the so what, right? Because if you spend 6 hours in a training class, you can't get those 6 hours back. So what is it that you're going to do that is actually going to forward the business or impact the business positively?

▶5:21HostCourtney, it sounds like you're a business leader disguised as an HR leader. You mentioned earlier transitioning from revenue-generating role to a non-revenue-generating role and some of the challenges and opportunities that were represented in that transition. I'm curious if you can elaborate more on how being a business person first and an HR leader second has shaped your mindset and your approach to HR leadership?

▶5:49GuestWell, Dave, thank you. I think actually that is something I've tried over the years to approach things with that business lens of how do we drive value for the business, right? So how do you learn about the P&L? How do you learn about the drivers and the levers that can affect EBITDA or profitability or service, whatever the metrics are that your annual operating plan is driving forward. So, in our business, we're manufacturing. So, when we can't get the order because of competition, or we've missed an original promised ship date, or a system goes down, none of those things are in my responsibility. They're in my peers' responsibility. So, I think about how does our people team actually help support the improvement of those processes? You know, sometimes we can't, and so it's all right, we can't do anything to help that. But other times we can. There's skills like business process analysis. We can lead continuous improvement. We can ask the 5 whys. We can skill build if someone doesn't have the skills to execute a task. We can help with communication or getting really crisp on what happened, how do we avoid it in the future, and what is the communication to the audience at large. I think those are core skills of any people partner, and people partners should have those. HR partners should have those so we can help. It's allowed me to take a different viewpoint into HR. You know, the last thing I personally want to do is policy policing or payroll corrections, but foundations crumble when you don't have rules.

▶7:26HostThat's a great perspective. And Courtney, can you share some specific examples of how you've created pathways and communication channels to give employees a voice in your company?

▶7:40GuestWell, sometimes the best feedback comes when you're least expecting it. I think you have to create a culture where all information is readily accessible and easily shared. The best thing you can do is listen to employees and invite their voices. It's you know, from an external perspective in marketing, we always talk about voice of the customer, right? So working backwards from your customer. When I think about HR, the entire business is my customer. It's not my executive team, yes, but it's everybody within the construct of our company walls who works, right? They're my customers. And so if I don't know what's top of mind, if we don't know what are the things that are important to them or motivating, We can come up with great strategies and great ideas that totally miss the mark. And so it is about making sure that we listen, that we encourage, that we invite. We've got an employee-driven newsletter that anyone can submit ideas to. We have blog posts on, you know, through SharePoint and our intranet. We do listening tours where members of the executive team sit down, you know, the chat and chew or coffee and conversation. And then regularly, we do roadshows. And so we sit down with employees and we walk manufacturing floors in order to really understand and appreciate what's going on. Sometimes people like anonymity. So in the employee survey, they can always submit anonymous comments and those drop boxes. So if you don't want to send an email, you can drop a little piece of paper in a box to give your feedback. I think we invite as much as possible. What I'd say is more important is what you do with it, right? So if people give you the feedback, it's a gift. Now what are you going to do to correct or improve or celebrate?

▶9:37HostCourtney, I'm curious if you could just expand on that a little more and answer the question of what do you do with that information when you get it?

▶9:45GuestYeah, that's a great one. So we are in the throes of getting feedback from our employee survey at the moment. So it's an annual global survey. And within, I don't know, 3 or 4 weeks, we'll have all of the analysis done. And what we did historically, and we'll do small improvements and tweaks this year, is we dissect and analyze the information, you know, 6 ways to Sunday. So is it by site? Is it by tenure? Is it by business group? And then we give the information back to our business leaders, right? So we lead them through a discovery session. Anonymity is key, so it's got to be a group of 5 in order to even hit the page. And there has to be themes. So a one-off anecdotal comment is interesting, but it's not a trend, right? You got to have 10 or more in order to make it a trend based on site size, et cetera. But then not only do we share it with the business leaders, we share all of the results with them, with the enterprise, with everyone. And then by team, we create almost like tiger teams to go in and say, hey, this is what your business unit said. What's important to you? Do you guys want to be status quo? Do you want to make changes? What's going to happen in the future? And then based on the passion and energy and what people have in front of them, they will attack. We will support. We will provide guidance or funding. Again, it's, I think it's so important if an employee is going to share positive or constructive, that it's all dealt with. And if there are Some gotchas on the survey feedback. I, I read, oh my gosh, you know, whether there's 700 pages, which it was a few years ago, or much less than that. I read every single comment because I want to know what people are saying. And then I, we create small teams to read those comments so that there's objectivity and there's not a bias. Like sometimes when you read, oh, it's great, great, great. Not really. It's just that those are the 17 pages you just read.

▶11:42HostWhat unique challenges and opportunities have you encountered while implementing HR strategies in a private equity environment?

▶11:52GuestOh goodness. A few. In a PE environment, and again, it depends on where the business is, but if it's a turnaround, there's often not a budget for people development, right? So training and development, or even recognition programs, like a recognition contest or award. And so when purse strings are tight, you have to get super creative because people want to be developed and they want to know that you're investing in them and you're helping them get better. Oftentimes we will tag on to another scheduled event. So looking at, hey, all of our salespeople are coming together this particular timeframe. What are the critical skills or competencies that would benefit them being able to accelerate revenue creation. So maybe that's bringing in a couple of speakers and oh, by the way, you don't have budgets for speakers. So who do you know in your network? And so I think the power of networking from a PE perspective is paramount. You have to do it because it's about getting creative. So you tap that friend on the shoulder who leads, you know, is the chief revenue officer of another company. You say, hey, come over and talk to our people. Share a little bit, kind of fireside chat, or if there's an opportunity to build an internal training and development program, maybe it's management, maybe it's coaching, it's some sort of competency development. If you can take that and create it into a facilitator guide that a business leader can lead, we've had great success leading management development programs using our business leaders. So it is a topic that is near to their heart, but we script the heck out of this, right? So that they can be successful. So it's their stories and their energy and their excitement in a way that is facilitated and more importantly, gives something to that audience, to that participant where, ooh, I never thought of it that way. I can do that in my next one-on-one conversation. So I think creativity is the most important. And then, you know, when you think about employee appreciation, there might not be budgets for an employee appreciation lunch. So you do a raffle with an awesome prize, or maybe you can't subsidize lunch in a manufacturing plant, but perhaps once per month it's free lunch Friday, right? So you get pretty creative with how you can still positively impact, but with limited purse strings.

▶14:30HostCourtney, sounds like you've taken a really creative and thoughtful approach around making sure employees feel empowered within your organization. I'm curious how you measure the success of initiatives that empower employees and what impact you've seen that have on business performance.

▶14:53GuestDave, the age-old question of how do you measure it, right? It's, I think it's very fair. One of our business leaders actually just a couple weeks ago said, hey, with the service of culture, you know, the culture of service initiative, how are you measuring success? What's our ROI? And I thought, it's a fantastic question. So upfront, you know, I'm very metric driven. And so I like data and I like to understand. How do we, if we're going to do something through the lens of value creation, what's the so what? How is it going to impact those priorities? And then more importantly, how are we going to measure that it has furthered the cause? So some things it could simply be, you know, to your question of how do you measure the employee empowerment initiative? It could be participation. If people come and they show up. It's important to them. It could be retention. The employees that have sticky, right, that are, that have that sticky factor, they stay with the organization, right? They're not jumping to the competitor or looking for a new opportunity outside your walls. We measure ENPS, right? So kind of an employee net promoter score. Would they recommend to their family and friends us as a place to work? And so we do that regularly. I think it's about impact, right? So everyone, myself included, we want to be appreciated and you want to work in a healthy environment. So sometimes teams are motivated to work longer or harder so that they can leave early, or they can go to the Friday volunteer offsite event. Others may want to create an impact on those around them. So they look at an opportunity, hey, I want to network, I want to meet those people, I want to create a following. So in my next couple of items for wider career opportunities, they know who I am when I next apply. So I think there's a variety of different mechanisms, and you just have to pick the few that will actually measure success based on what success is at the outset.

▶16:56HostCourtney, any parting advice you'd like to share with our audience?

▶17:00GuestI wish someone told me this early in my career. There's so much success to go around, like so much success. So how do you lift others up in a way that allows you to win, right? There's always going to be someone behind you who wants your job or who can do it better than you or faster than you, or is there to criticize you. But if you flip that, how can you win together? How can you take their strength and learn a little bit more about how they do that? And how do you partner so that you both can be successful? Truly lift others up and celebrate your peers' wins, whether it's your direct reports, your peers, your hierarchical chain. Celebrate those successes, and success absolutely will come your way.

▶17:51HostCourtney, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶17:56GuestThanks, Dave. Appreciate it.